Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Southwest Florida reporter parrots canard that women do not lie about rape

Comment: In the following news report, a locale is stricken by its second reported false rape claim in several days (I say "reported" because, as we have shown on this website, police are adept at making the vast majority of these false claims go away with no embarrassment to the accusers), yet the news report printed below this comment uses this as the occasion to spread the canard that false reporting is rare, and that the victims of false reporting are female.

This news report epitomizes the reason we started this website.

The sexual assault counseling industry's assertions that only two percent of all rape claims are false and that this figure mirrors reports of other crimes are, to put it charitably, devious canards. Yet, we still have reporters like Christina Hernandez who, unfortunately, repeat their assertions without refutation or balance.

In the news report below, the two percent statistic is tossed off with no authority beyond the serene ipsedixit of the sexual assault counselor who is cited. In fact, as we have repeatedly demonstrated, this figure that has been thoroughly discredited. See e.g., this law review article that traced that stat to its disingenuous origins, for example, or this piece (". . . no study has ever been published which sets forth an evidentiary basis for the ‘two percent false rape complaint’ thesis . . . .") Nevertheless, the canard is repeated so often, it has taken on a truth of its own, like the Nazi "Big Lie."

In addition, FBI statistics show that false reporting of sexual assault is fourfold greater than the average for all crimes. The Politics of Sexuality, Barry M. Dank, Editor in Chief, Vol. 3 at 36, n. 8.

The most authoritative study ever conducted on the subject of false rape reports, the Kanin report, showed 41% of all rape claims in the area sampled were not just false but recanted in the face of overwhelming evidence that the allegation was false.

And we need to repeat this point: in the sexual assault field, claims classified as "false" are only those that can be categorically declared lies, but it is well to remember that the number of actual false claims is certainly higher. Rape is not a claim that can always readily be declared "false," given that it often comes down to "he said/she said" evidence. So if, on the one end, there is a certain percentage of claims that are considered "false," and on the other end, a small percentage of claims that end in conviction of rape, how do we classify the claims in the middle? In between the obviously false and the claims that lead to conviction, the vast majority of rape claims are dismissed somewhere along the way because of insufficient evidence (which means there was not enough evidence to make out one or more elements of the crime, even if a trier of fact believed the evidence -- hardly a technicality) or because the accuser decides not to pursue the claim or the jury just doesn't buy it. To suggest that all of these rape claims that fall between the obviously "false" (due primarily to recantation) and those that end in conviction, are, by necessity, "rapes," is dishonest in the extreme. See here. Yet that is the implication of the paid sexual assault counseling industry.

Unfortunately, no amount of objectively verifiable scholarship debunking the erroneous statistic continuously trotted out will ever cause its advocates to back away from it. The financially interested sexual assault counseling industry often (and I don't know for certain about this particular case -- but often) is not seeking to advance facts, but rather its ideological view of the world -- and it is seeking to justify its existence by fomenting rape hysteria.

In addition, the story below would have us believe that the the true victims false rape claims are the future, unknown, hypothetical, phantom, possible, could-be, even unborn rape victims who might be, possibly will be, may be dissuaded by such lies from coming forward of actual crimes. Most assuredly, these hypothetical women are victims of false rape claims. But the primary victims of false rape claims are men and boys falsely accused of rape.

Ms. Hernandez would do well to spend several days reading the true life horror stories of men and boys falsely accused of rape, recounted on this website.

The fact that apparently the false claims did not name specific males is not pertinent to the issue. Innumerable young men have been arrested and subject to the terror of possibly years behind bars based on rape lies that didn't name a specific male. One only needs to spend some time reviewing this website to understand this. Even when they are not named, every rape lie puts innocent men and boys at risk -- usually men and boys who are black or Hispanic. False rape accusers often concoct a "scary" minority as their pretend attackers to lend plausibility to their prevarications. So, you see, this is not only a gender issue, it is also often a race issue.

In the news story below, the primary victims of false rape claims are completely ignored, and their victimization dismissed by insisting that false claims are a myth. Although false reporting of rape is a crime whose victims are almost exclusively male, the entire discussion in this area has become so embroiled in the politicized, radical feminist sexual assault milieu that even mentioning it as a potentially significant problem for men is verboten because such view does not conform to the rape culture metanarrative that insists women are sexually tyrannized, oppressed and subjugated by the patriarchy (and let's be honest, that's a code word for "men"). When the crime of false rape reporting is discussed at all, it is almost always discussed through a gynocentric filter, a gender feminist lens that blinks at the harm it causes innocent men. Misinformation is the engine that drives this culture of female victimization, and rape hysteria and the minimization of false rape claims are its noxious emissions.

Reporter Hernandez would do well to contact me the next time she is tempted to write a story like this. She has done a disservice to the countless men and boys falsely accused of this vile crime by suggesting their victimization is rare. Here is the news story: